Keynote Speakers

Benjamin K. Sovacool is a Professor of Energy Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the School of Business, Management, and Economics, part of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He is also Director of the Center for Energy Technologies and Professor of Business and Social Sciences in the Department of Business Development and Technology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Professor Sovacool works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to energy policy, energy security, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation. More specifically, his research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change.

Professor Sovacool is the founding Editor-in-Chief for the international peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, published by Elsevier, and he sits on the Editorial Advisory Panel of Nature Energy. Professor Sovacool is the author of more than 300 refereed articles, book chapters, and reports, and the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of 18 books on energy and climate change topics, including those with MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Nature Publishing Group/Palgrave.

Malcolm McCulloch is an Associate Professor in Engineering Science and a Tutor at Christchurch College. In 1993 he moved to The University of Oxford to start up the Electrical Power Group. Climate change, resource depletion and social inequity are the big challenges facing our civilisation. The group’s focus has now changed to developing, and commercialising, sustainable energy technologies. He has active research programmes in the four sectors of developing world, domestic energy use, transport and renewable generation.

He has over 85 publications and 10 patent and patent applications. He believes that developing the technology is only the start. There needs to be a public awareness of the seriousness of the problems. Therefore he has been instrumental, together with a small team of people, in conceiving and developing Tipping Point, an annual event to bring some of the top artists and climate scientists together. Through the creative use of the open space format, this forum has proved to be extremely successful and has found international acceptance. This led to his being an advisor to world-renowned Ian McEwan for his book Solar.

He has also been involved presenting the research to a wide range of audiences, from schools to the World Economic Forum in China in 2010.

Kajsa Ellegard is a Professor of Technology and social change at Linköping University, Sweden. Technology and Social Change is an interdisciplinary research unit focusing on how social actors create and use technology, and how technical change is woven together with cultural patterns, daily life, politics, energy systems, learning, and the economy in history and society. Her research interests include time-geography, the visualisation of activity patterns in everyday life, technologies embedded in daily activities, division of labor in households, developments in work life (technology, learning, work organization) and energy use in everyday life.

Skip Laitner : Due to circumstances beyond his control Skip unfortunately will not be presenting at the conference.

Janet Stephenson : Dr Stephenson leads the Energy Cultures research programme, which examines opportunities for improving energy use in households, businesses and transport through interdisciplinary research. She is a social scientist with a strong interest in socio-technical transitions and societal responses to environmental challenges. She is Director of Centre for Sustainability at University of Otago, which specialises in interdisciplinary research into sustainability issues.